Pentecost August 17,1980

On an April Thursday in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee. The following Sunday, King's father, Martin Luther King, Sr., stood to preach in his pulpit of many years at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Standing in his pulpit with tea in his eyes, he remained silent for a moment. During those hour-long seconds; people wondered what the old man would say. Would there be a white flag of surrender? "We give up, humans of different colors cannot live in peace and mutual respect in this nation." Or would there be a call to revenge, bloodshed, and racial war as some were demanding? Those responses would have been tragically understandable. What he said was unexpected and even more shocking. "Man, you've killed my son, but I'm going to love you anyway.”

What that old man in Atlanta said when his son was murdered has helped me understand what God has said to the world in Jesus Christ: You've killed my son; you continue to hurt and ignore my children, you even do damage to that son or daughter of mine that lives in your own skin, but I am going to love you anyway. "That's tough forgiving. It's what our God is all about. 

In fact, it is even tough to believe in a forgiving God, much less a forgiving one. With so much conflicting evidence, it is difficult at best on some days to believe in a God at all. But one then who loves, forgives, and cares about us in spite of our foul-ups and meanness to boot? Wow! The Gospels portray a Jesus who used every ounce and minute of his life trying to show humans that God is real and that he does love us anyway and all the way. Indeed, Jesus bet his life and death on the notion that God is not hell-bent to punish us but love-bent to forgive us. 

That's a hard truth to get into hard-headed, tough-hearted, and fast-talking humans. Jesus kept pointing people to evidence of God's presence and love before their very noses: lilies growing in fields, deftly formed sparrows in the air, and life refreshing rains which fall on stinkers and saints alike. Yet most of all, he told parables, "true" stories about the way God is and the way we need to be. 

The parable of the prodigal son or the lost son uses an earthly father who loved his son anyway to depict our God who loves each of us that way. Apparently, the good upstanding Pharisees were enraged because Jesus speaking in the name of God announced to the riff-raff of that society the people with dirty fingernails who don't say "please and thank you" that they had a first class reserved seat in God's kingdom and love along with the Pharisees. So, to people who did not want to hear the truth, Jesus told a story. It was about a boy who did all the wrong things, he practically spit in his father's face because he couldn't even wait for the old man to kick off before he asked for his inheritance. The son takes off, lives high for a while, and then hits bottom, Finally, he comes to his senses and with tucked tail heads home. The father is waiting and longing for his lost child. Others tell him that he should forget him, write him off, good riddance to such a stinker. Yet the old man waits. And then one day he sees that boy coming down the road. When he sees him coming, he does something no dignified Palestinian father of that time would do: he leaps and runs to his son instead of the custom of waiting for the dutiful child to come to him. He threw his arms around him, kissed him, and said something akin to: "No matter what, Son, I love you anyway.” The grumbling Pharisees to whom scholars think Jesus told this parable, no doubt, found their counterpart in the elder brother, the Dudley Doright who was good in the worst sense of the word. "Gosh, Ded, I've always been a good boy, but you never let me have a barbecue with my friends.” With salty droplets on his cheeks, the father reminds his son that all he has belongs to him as well, and he pleads that he love his brother anyway because he has come home.

Each year I live, I realize more how very difficult, how tough, forgiveness is to give and receive. But thank God the "I love you anyways" happen. Let's look at some areas where tough forgiving is needed in our lives. These are areas which in their own way are as much if not more difficult than accepting God's forgiveness, his forgiveness which makes all the rest of this have a chance.

Jesus didn't say, but my hunch is that the prodigal son had as tough if not tougher time facing himself in the mirror as he did facing his father when he arrived home. In the Holy Communion ritual there is a line that always rivets me: "We... are heartily sorry for our misdoings; the remembrance of them GRIEVES us. In a real sense, for many FORGIVING OURSELVES is much harder than accepting God’s forgiveness. "Maybe God does forgive me for my rottenness, maybe he does love me anyway. But I can't quite forgive myself, love myself anyway.” Our internal dialogue may run this way: "If people just knew, if they really knew me the way I know me (and I am going to do everything I can to prevent it), then they would know why I can’t be at peace with me. 

In his little book Loving Ourselves, Ray Ashford tells of a mentally ill young doctor who in a psychotic rage killed his young child. Confined to a mental hospital for the criminally insane, the man became sicker because of the shattering guilt for what he had done to his child. He was driven by his sense of badness, his need to be punished. One day, the young doctor thrust his hand into the steel blades of the hospital's giant institutional washing machine. Strangely, after that the man regained his sanity. He lost his hand but regained his health because in the mystery of his mind he had finally been punished enough. 

The message of the Gospel, of Jesus Christ, is that we don't have to do it that way. We don't have to go on punishing ourselves for that thing we did or that thing we failed to do. Self-punishment does us or those who try to live with us no good. It is not God's will that we withhold forgiveness from ourselves when he so freely gives it. It is not his will that we forbid ourselves to be happy and enjoy our life because we have played God with ourselves and declared ourselves guilty, unloveable, and worthy for punishment for life. It is said that a man who tries to be his own lawyer has a fool for a client. I say a man or woman who tries to be his or her own judge and executioner is a goner. Who do we think we are when we put our standards higher than God? It's tough forgiving to love ourselves anyway! God help us. 

Bill Curl, last week in his sermon, spoke sensitively about another area of this loving ourselves anyway. For many of us our problem may not be a bad deed we have done in the past. It is more a basic dissatisfaction with ourselves because we don't find the perfection in and around us that we want. We fret because we don't look as good as we would like. I want to be the king of the hill and then when I find that I am only about average at what I do, then I feel such anger at myself and anyone else I can blame. I want things to go one way. They go another as they usually do. And so I am willing to write myself off. Even here is needed this tough self-forgiveness of loving ourselves anyway. We need to get ourselves off our own backs and have what the psychologist and associate of Freud Alfred Adler called the "courage of our imperfections." That is, the courage to go on with our lives, love ourselves anyway, even when we don't meet standards which are often preposterous anyway. We need to say: "I may not be a '10' in looks, possessions, or blue ribbon achievements. But I am going to be the best '6' you have ever seen. Most of us love bumbling, stumbling humans a lot more than perfect machines anyway. Evidently, for reasons perhaps only known to him, God does. So, I say if I am good enough for God to love anyway, then I am good enough for me to love anyway! 

To FORGIVE OTHERS is not much easier than to forgive ourselves. When someone has truly let us down, betrayed our trust, and made us hurt, it is tough to kiss and make up. Here, I have in my mind the image of Charlie Brown rubbing his backside after Lucy has pulled the football away for the jillionth time just as he is about to kick it. There are dozens of responses that no doubt come to his mind before the notion of forgiving her, a forgiveness she doesn't always seem to particularly want in the first place. It is not easy to forgive, to love someone anyway, when they have ignored your existence, stolen your thunder, or stuck it to you. Maybe, that is one reason Jesus talked so much about turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, going the second mile, and forgiving 70 X 7. And I am not sure who is the toughest: the person sitting across the dinner table who has hurt our feelings or the groups far away like the Iranians who have hurt our pride. Still, there is one unnecessary hurdle that we place before ourselves in loving each other anyway after a break has occurred. I talked about it in a newsletter article some time ago, but I think it bears repeating.

This has to do with the matter of forgiving and forgetting. If I can forget what I am forgiving you for, then what you did wasn't much and I didn't really care that deeply. If my loving you anyway is done because I can forget the hurt, then my forgiveness is really no big deal, a cheapie. I will tell you what a miracle and a mystery is! It is when someone forgives and remembers, when that person loves me anyway even after something has happened that cannot be forgotten. That is the kind of love that can break our hearts and give us the deep relationships that money or smooth sailing can never buy or bring. To forgive, to love anyway, even when I can't forget is an affirmation that I will not allow the past to destroy our future together. 

Jesus' story doesn't say what the elder brother finally did about his younger brother. I have a notion that he wasn't able to forget his hurt with his father and brother. He wasn't asked to do so. I don't think that the father ever forgot his days of agonizing worry about his son while he was gone, wondering whether it was somehow his fault, wondering if he had just done things another way. The priceless gift, the grace, to give is to forgive what can't be forgotten. 

A third and final arena for tough forgiving struck me when I read a recent book entitled The Vicar of Christ by Walter Murphy. It is the story of a man who is a war hero in the Korean War, who later becomes chief justice of the Supreme Court, and who finally in a more-believable-than-it-sounds scenario of events, becomes the first American Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. While chief justice, the character Declan Walsh is informed that his beautiful wife has been killed in a tragic car accident. Shattered and in a rage he screams for God to show his face like a man and answer for her senseless, innocent death. He screams: "Come down and wrestle with me.... You can beat me, but you can't make me lick your hand for murdering my wife....Fight me like a man!" A priest friend, not sure if what Walsh has just said or  what he himself is about to say is blasphemy, speaks tenderly to him: "Can you forgive?...Yes, forgive... Is your God beyond needing forgiveness?" The priest friend Galeotti goes on to say that the notion makes no sense to his mind and what he has been taught in theology but with the reasonings of the heart there may be times in life then we have to FORGIVE GOD, or in the words of our sermon today, to love even God anyway.

In the parable, this is certainly what the elder brother has to do with his father. He has to decide if he will continue to be faithful to his father even though his Dad did not do things as he wanted him to do. This situation left the realm of story and entered the grisly reality of life for even Jesus. There in the Garden of Gethsemane, he asked his heavenly there was any other way to bring the world to its senses other than his death. It was God's will not Jesus' that decided. Jesus, like you and I, had to decide if we would go on loving his heavenly father anyway when things went in a way that Jesus really didn't want them to go. 

By speaking of those painful times in our lives when we feel like Job, shaking our fists at God, I do not mean that God intentionally or willfully does us wrong. There are just times in life when that God-given gift of freedom goes against us: cells grow malignant Instead of healthily, cars and drivers lose control. As you have heard me say before, God disclosed to Job, it is just not easy to be God. It isn't easy even for God to keep four billion humans on a small planet going, particularly when we ignore his ways of caring and sharing most of the time.

So in a strange way, there are times when we may even have to do the tough forgiving of God, loving him anyway for the many blessings of his gift of life even when all of it does not go the way we want. He can take our anger, our screams, and our questions. But I truly believe it grieves him when we reject him. Plus the fact that we cut ourselves off from the very one who binds our wounds and dries our tears when life falls in on top of us. 

It has not been easy for God to love us. It has cost him many of his children, even his SON. Yet, tough forgiving is one of the secrets that make life worth the effort. 

God, help us love anyway: ourselves, each other, you. God, help us love anyway, as we have been loved anyway. Amen.